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The Trouble With Charles Krauthammer

When Barack Obama began positioning himself as a presidential aspirant, toward the end of 2006, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer offered some encouraging words. Obama, he wrote at the time, has “an affecting personal history.” More importantly, he had something in common with another once-popular presidential aspirant, Colin Powell; both, it turned out, were black. “Race is only one element in their popularity,” Krauthammer noted, “but an important one. A historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African-American ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of African-Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in American life.” Though the column made a strong case for Obama’s candidacy in terms of his identity, it included not a word concerning what the first-term Senator might bring to the table in terms of policy.

Less than two years later, Krauthammer was expressing disgust with those who would make the case for Obama’s candidacy in terms of his identity, rather than his policies. “The pillars of American liberalism—the Democratic Party, the universities and the mass media—are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender,” he helpfully explained, adding that the 2008 Democratic primary represented “the full flowering of identity politics. It’s not a pretty picture.”Regardless of what views he may think he holds regarding the legitimacy of Obama’s personal appeal, Krauthammer has plenty of other, presumably firmer stances on the president and his doings, and has even emerged as the most significant of the administration’s opponents among the right. In a profile that made the rounds last May, Politico’s Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be “a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president” and a “central conservative voice” in the “Age of Obama.” New York Times mainstay David Brooks recently characterized him as “the most important conservative columnist right now.” When Krauthammer was presented with an award this summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate the veteran commentator. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.

Krauthammer qualifies as something of a sober elder statesman among today’s conservative commentariat, given that he doesn’t use the term “Democrat Party” and has so far refrained from screaming or crying on television. And many of his arguments in opposition to liberalism are quite cogent, which is certainly a fine thing for an argument to be. Tragically, though, someone appears to have convinced him that he is some sort of expert on foreign policy and military affairs. This was a pretty mean thing to do.

When NATO sought to derail another potential Balkan genocide by way of its 1999 air bombing campaign against Serbia, Krauthammer denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of Clinton, arguing that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he tried to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, “we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground.” But the columnist leaves out the rest of Clark’s answer, in which it is explained that “the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic” and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that. For good measure, Krauthammer also criticizes Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict (“The stresses of war, no doubt”); he seems to have changed his mind on the propriety of such stress-relief measures around 2002 or so.

Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement “would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries.” When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that “the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion,” making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a “quagmire.” The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO and the European Union.

Like many others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into our two more recent military adventures in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. He ridiculedNew York Times contributor R.W. “Johnny” Apple for writing one article warning that Afghanistan may develop into a “quagmire” and another proposing that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq. Krauthammer himself initially hailed the Iraq conflict as “the Three Week War”; when those guerrillas whose existence he had found so improbable actually materialized and U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to have been implemented largely by dipshit Liberty University grads, Krauthammer responded with studied sarcasm. “Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done,” he wrote, before going on to explain how it really should have been done. He concluded the 2003 column with the suggestion that, if “in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated.” Two years later, Krauthammer followed up by admitting to his failures and acknowledging the predictive superiority of his opponents.

Just kidding.

Instead, he took to denouncing retired military figures like John Batiste as the “I-know-better generals” for second-guessing Rumsfeld, whom he continued to support after even William Kristol had begun calling for the defense secretary’s resignation. Later, when the surge was proposed, Krauthammer came out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that it “will fail” due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government; today, he deems the strategy to have been a success. Thus it is that this most respected of conservative commentators may be the only pundit in the country to have been wrong about every major U.S. foreign policy question of the last decade.

Krauthammer hasn’t fared much better in the realm of domestic predictions. In his aforementioned column on Obama—the one in which he praises the Senator’s blackness, not the one in which he attacks everyone else for doing the same—our columnist explains that, should Obama run, “he will not win. The reason is 9/11.” In the meantime, he tells us, the White House will probably go to a Republican—“say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani.” Krauthammer also warns that the “reflexive anti-war sentiments” of the left “will prove disastrous for the Democrats in the long run—the long run beginning as early as November ‘08.”

Though well up to speed on his silly-predictions quota, Krauthammer would still be in danger of losing his parking spot at The Weekly Standard if he failed to turn out the occasional bit of preternatural hypocrisy as well. Fear not. Two days after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, he appeared on Fox News order to point out the inevitable Islam connection:

Krauthammer: And he did leave the return address ‘Ismail Ax.’ ‘Ismail Ax.’ I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.

Brit Hume: Which was, “My name is Ismael.”

Close enough, Brit. But in his next column, Krauthammer denounces “the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage,” citing gun control advocates for their bad taste in drawing social conclusions from tragedy. “Perhaps in the spirit of Obama’s much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.” He had already gotten his own licks in, after all.

So, there you go. That’s Charles Krauthammer.

Barrett Brown's second book, Caught, Fat, and Clouded: The Manifold Failures of the American Punditry, will be released in 2010. He also serves